how to become exceptional
frameworks for achievement and despair
You don't like where you are.
It seems like some people get where they want to be effortlessly; they rise ever upwards, guided by an albatross that passed you by. Meanwhile, you’re stuck waiting for something: clarity, luck, or permission.
I’m happy to say several of my friends are like this. Not only are they highly accomplished in different domains, they’re unusually resilient, thoughtful, easygoing, and self-aware. Many conquered the odds and underwent a lot of hardship to get where they are.
Despite the diversity of personality and experience, certain common frameworks connect them all. Learning from this pattern helped me accelerate my own life significantly.
Waking up early, eating healthy, drinking water, working out….good advice overused to the point of cliché. The mental frameworks that set you up for achievement are far more subtle.
Stop waiting for clarity.
From afar it looks like successful people somehow magically know where to put their efforts. I asked careful questions, hoping to figure out the following:
How did you, years ago, know that this would work out? Why did you choose this as opposed to something else?
I knew I had potential. I wanted to figure out my own path forward. How had they found the clarity that continued to elude me?
They all had the same answer. They didn’t.
They had no idea! They invested a whole lot of consistent effort and often sacrificed a great deal for something they had zero reassurance would work. In their history they had done it time and time again and had sometimes failed. But nothing stopped them from trying once more.
I, like most of us, spent my life shivering on the edge of the pool. They leapt.
Internalize the J-curve.
I see this pattern everywhere: it takes around two years for any given endeavor to start reaping impressive fruit.